His heading was south-southwest, a route that followed the glittering ribbon of the Tamarack River upstream, then over Bream Pond and down into the village of Tunbridge, avoiding the Tamarack clubhouse grounds and golf course, where he banked to port. Holding steady at twenty-five hundred feet he followed the Tamarack River toward its headwaters, flying over rising unbroken forest into the Reserve.
He knew that she would be waiting for him at her father’s camp — no more an actual camp than her father’s Park Avenue apartment. But calling it a camp helped people like the Coles coddle their dream of living in a world in which they did no harm. It let them believe that for a few weeks or a month or two, even though their so-called camps were as elaborately luxurious as their homes elsewhere, they were roughing it, living like the locals, whom they hired as housekeepers, cooks, guides, and caretakers: the locals, who were thought by people like the Coles to be lucky — lucky to live year-round in such pristine isolation and beauty.
Crossing over the First Lake, Jordan spotted a pair of fishermen in a guide boat casting flies along the eastern shore. This isn’t going to work, he thought and was relieved. And a moment later, at the headwaters, when he came over the rise and looked down the cowl and surveyed the length and breadth of the Second Lake and saw that there was no one out on the water or fishing from the banks, he was faintly disappointed. He put the airplane down in the middle of the lake and taxied toward the eastern shore, then brought it along the shore to the shallows just off the Coles’ camp.
Vanessa, wearing a pale yellow head scarf and denim shirt and tan slacks, stood on the shore by an overturned guide boat. She was smoking a cigarette. Jordan shut the engine down and when the propeller had wheeled to a stop told her to come aboard and remove her precious cargo from his airplane.
“We need to scatter Daddy’s ashes from the air,” she said.
“From the air? No! Do it from the guide boat. I’m in a hurry.”
“I can’t hold the jar and row the boat at the same time. Those little wooden things are pretty to look at, maybe, but they’re tippy.”
“What about your mother? Let her row and you hug your father’s jar. Or vice versa. I’m just making a delivery, Miss Von Heidenstamm.”
Vanessa explained that, after the long walk from the clubhouse in to the First Lake and the trip across both lakes to camp, her mother wasn’t feeling well enough to go out in the boat again. Besides, this was not something her mother wanted to participate in. It was just too sad for her even to contemplate. Vanessa didn’t want to put her through it. She was doing this strictly for her father. His last wish.
“All right, then, let’s get it done,” he said and this time did not offer to help her step from the water to the pontoon and climb from there to the wing. She carefully advanced along the wing to the fuselage and saw the jar.
“Take off the tape and hold it in your lap,” he said to her.
“Jordan, I can’t tell you what this means to me,” she said. “What it means to my mother. And to my father. Him, especially. I do hope you’re not angry with me.”
“For sticking me with a Chinese jug filled with your father’s ashes? Trapping me into coming out here like this? Of course I’m angry with you.”
“I don’t think so. I think this is something you’ll never forget, Jordan. Or regret.” She slid into the cockpit, stripped the tape off the jar, and placed the jar on her lap.
“Miss Von Heidenstamm, I already regret it.”
“You don’t have to call me that.”
“What?”
“It was my married name. And I’m no longer married to him. Call me Vanessa.”
“I’m going to taxi out to the middle of the lake. When I get there, you dump the ashes over the side, and I’ll bring you back. And then, Vanessa Von Heidenstamm, I’ll be on my merry way.”
“That’s really very boring, you know.”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“Much more interesting to scatter Daddy’s ashes from the sky.”
“True.” Without turning, he instructed her to take off her head scarf and remove the top of the jar and cover the jar with the scarf.
“Why?”
“Because of the wind. I’ll tell you when to empty it. Just be sure you hold the damn thing out to the side as far as you can, and don’t remove the scarf until you upend the jar to dump it, or the wind and the prop wash will blow your daddy’s ashes all over you and inside the plane. I damn sure don’t want to have to clean Dr. Cole’s remains out of my airplane.”
She gave the back of his head a grim smile. He restarted the engine and took the airplane back out toward the middle of the lake, where he hit the throttle, gathered speed, and put it into the air. At about five hundred feet he leveled off and banked the airplane toward the headwaters of the lake. He cut the speed to seventy knots and dropped it down until it was barely a hundred feet above the water, following the axis of the long, narrow lake from south to north. When he spotted the Coles’ camp coming up on his right, he slowed again and dropped another fifty feet, and hollered back, “Go ahead, do it now!”
Vanessa hefted the jar to her shoulder, steadied it there for a few seconds with both hands, and facing it away from the wash, quickly extended it out to the side as far as she could and removed the scarf and emptied it. A gray swash of ash and bits of bone exploded into the air behind the airplane and drifted slowly down to the water, when suddenly Vanessa cried, “Oh, no!”
Jordan jerked his head around and saw the jar drop from the airplane like a green stone. He watched it splash into the lake, where it sank almost at once. Vanessa’s scarf fluttered slowly down to the lake behind it.
“I dropped the damn thing!” Vanessa cried. “I dropped it!”
Jordan brought the airplane around and flew across the spot where the jar had gone in, locating it on a bisected pair of lines running the width and length of the lake. He saw the yellow scarf floating southward on the dark water, like a pale hieroglyph. “Try to memorize the shore points on both sides of the lake and at the ends!” he shouted. “The scarf’ll drift and sink anyhow, so don’t look at it.”
“It’s gone, Jordan!”
“No, it’s not! You can row out and dive for it!”
“You idiot, it’s hundreds of feet deep there!”
He didn’t respond. He brought the airplane in close to shore and splashed down a short ways below the camp, taxied back to where he’d picked her up, and cut the engine. For a moment they sat motionless in the silence, the airplane rocking gently on its pontoons. Finally Jordan said, “Hey, look, Vanessa, I’m sorry about the jar. Seriously. It was very beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“And I never said it to you right. I’m sorry about your father, too.”
“No, it’s probably the best thing. The jar, I mean. Daddy loved that old jar more than any other thing he owned. Except this camp.”
“It’s probably worth a fortune, though. The jar.”
“Mother would never have sold it. No, it’s only right that it’s still with him…and that they’re both at the bottom of the lake.” Her eyes filled with tears.